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Restricted attentional capacity within but not between sensory modalities

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Abstract

Restrictions to attentional capacity are revealed by the interference that commonly results when two sensory inputs must be identified at the same time1. To investigate this phenomenon within and between modalities, we presented streams of visual and/or auditory inputs, containing occasional targets to be identified and recalled. For two visual or two auditory streams, identification of one target produced a sustained reduction in the ability to identify a second, the period of interference lasting for several hundred milliseconds. Subjectively, when attention was assigned to one target it was temporarily unavailable for another. In contrast, there was no such time-locked interference between targets in different modalities. The results suggest a modality-specific restriction to concurrent attention and awareness; visual attention to one simple target does not restrict concurrent auditory attention to another.

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Figure 1: Example trial for single-modality auditory experiment.
Figure 2: Example trial for single-modality visual experiment.
Figure 3: Mean accuracy (percentage correct word identification) in single-modality experiments.
Figure 4: Mixed-modality experiment.
Figure 5: Mixed-modality experiment.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Christopher Robinson and Sally Cox for initial work on this project, and to Sophie Scott and Christian Lorenzi for assistance with stimulus generation and measurement.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. *MRC Applied Psychology Unit, 15 Chaucer Road, CB2 2EF, Cambridge, UK

    John Duncan

  2. †Unit of Experimental and Theoretical Psychology, Faculty of Social Sciences, Leiden University, PO Box 9555, 2300 RB, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Sander Martens

  3. ‡School of Psychology, University of Wales, Bangor, LL57 2DG, Gwynedd, UK

    Robert Ward

  4. Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to J.D.,

    John Duncan

Authors
  1. John Duncan
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  2. Sander Martens
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  3. Robert Ward
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Correspondence to John Duncan.

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Duncan, J., Martens, S. & Ward, R. Restricted attentional capacity within but not between sensory modalities. Nature 387, 808–810 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1038/42947

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